rational - Rake -- Ruby Make:

It started yesterday. I was helping a coworker fix a problem in one of the Makefiles we use in our project. Not a particularly tough problem, but during the course of the conversation I began lamenting some of the shortcomings of make. In particular, in one of my makefiles I wanted to determine the name of a file dynamically and had to resort to some simple scripting (in Ruby) to make it work. "Wouldn't it be nice if you could just use Ruby inside a Makefile" I said.